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Comment by izacus | Hacker News Reader

> I imagine Google is in an awkward spot because, since ads is their bread and butter, they can't meaningfully penalize these websites without eating into their own bottom line. Many of the most intrusive ads are google ads.

The fun thing is that NOT fixing this will kill them long term as well - they're like meth heads seeing how the drug is destroying their body and the short-term optimizing managers, C-suites and, in the end, stock market cannot make a decision to make a bit less money to clean themselves up and wean off the drug that's killing them. Easier to fire people isn't it?

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Well how would you fix Google's predicament? I think it's easy enough to conclude they're harming themselves, but what are their options?

Their only Hope at long term viability is something like the wall between advertising and editorial at old school media companies. Yes, it’s fashionable to be jaded but it really did work that way.

Google needs its product people to not know or care about as revenue. They need to make search as efficient as possible, without regard for whether a good search result reduces ad clicks.

Revenue would go do, but not catastrophically. And they’d have a sustainable business that would be hard to disrupt.

I'd shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders.

Honestly the problem is that Google has been trying to fix it. Alternative and diverse incomes is the solution.

Everyone wants to make a good product, but ads make a product worse. Everyone wants to make a heavily used product but pay-per-use or subscriptions are limiting.

Google Cloud+Workplace, YouTube Premium, Play Store, Nest, ahem Stadia. Google has plenty of attempts at building products that make money without ads. The problem is that they’re expensive and not nearly as profitable.

LLM are bad at search, but people seem to like they. It gives them a clean re-start of search and maybe they’ll use it to do a search subscription where they can retry building their one good product without ads. Probably not though.

> Everyone wants to make a good product

Well, most do, but certainly not everyone. What almost everyone wants to make is a profitable product.

> What almost everyone wants to make is a profitable product

I actually think Google and many tech companies have the opposite problem. They forget about monetization until after they made a desirable product, then they have no way to make money unless they shoe-horn ads into it.

This is basically a pricing problem. G needs to strike a balance between the naked profitability of selling more ugly and dysfunctional ads versus increasing user delight by delivering more useful search results. While adding more ads boosts their revenue per search, the concomitant loss in value to the user is driving us away per result. The consequence: the user is increasingly looking elsewhere to escape the imbalance between Google's single minded focus on boosting revenue, damn the user.

Many of us have blunted the worst of G search's ugliness using ad blockers, but the polluting of their results by hiding useful content behind myriad lines of useless SEO detritus still dominates, and this loss of value as a utility inescapably poisons their life blood.

Until G's management realizes that their salvation lies NOT in blithely driving away customers, and instead strike a better balance by employing filters that better reject the more irrelevant and less profitable noise among their results, they will continue their current march toward oblivion -- as smarter competitors serve up more palatable search fare, and eat Google's lunch.

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